The 48-year-old former mayor of College Park, Maryland was sentenced to more than 100 years behind bars after he pleaded guilty to 140 charges for the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Associate Seventh Circuit Court Judge Karen H. Mason on Monday ordered Patrick Wojahn to serve 150 years in a state correctional facility, but decided to suspend 120 years of that sentence, authorities announced.
Specifically, Wojahn in August pleaded guilty to 60 counts of distribution, 40 counts of possession, and 40 counts of possession of child sex abuse material with intent to distribute, records show.
Judge Mason also sentenced Wojahn to serve five years of probation upon his release and to register as a sex offender. Under Maryland state law, defendants convicted of nonviolent crimes are eligible to be released on parole after completing 25% of their sentence. In Wojahn’s case that would be 7 1/2 years.
Effectively, that means that if Wojahn is released and violates the conditions of his probation, he can be sent back to prison for the remaining 120 years of his sentence.
Former College Park Mayor Patrick L. Wojahn (Prince George’s County (Md.) Police Dept.)
The Sentence
In a news conference following the sentencing hearing, prosecutors said that the CSAM found on Wojahn’s electronic devices was quite disturbing and included pictures and videos of infants and toddlers being sexually abused by adults.
“This sentence is instructive. It instructs us that child pornography is not simply about images,” State’s Attorney for Prince George’s County Aisha Braveboy said in a statement following the hearing, per Washington, D.C., NBC affiliate WRC. “It’s about the pain behind the images.”
Prosecutors reportedly also said that there was hundreds of child victims being sexually abused in the material found on Wojahn’s devices, noting that investigators were able to identify 52 of the victims, at least one of whom had died by suicide. Several of those victims penned victim impact statements that prosecutors read in court, The Baltimore Sun reported.
Assistant State’s Attorney for Prince George’s County Jess Garth discussed the perpetual effect victims of CSAM suffer throughout their lives when people like Wojahn view and distribute photos and videos of that abuse.
“They have to live what happened to them for rest of their lives,” Garth said during the news conference, according to WRC. “And also live with the knowledge that other people around the world will continue to view that abuse.”
As previously reported by Law&Crime, Wojahn in March resigned as mayor of College Park — home to the University of Maryland campus — following his arrest in March 2023.
The Investigation and Arrest
According to a press release from the Prince George’s County Police Department, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) notified detectives in February 2023 that a social media account operating within the department’s jurisdiction “possessed and distributed suspected child pornography.”
Police said the images and videos in question had been uploaded to a social media account in January 2023.
“Through various investigative techniques, PGPD investigators discovered the social media account belonged to Wojahn,” authorities said.
Detectives obtained and executed a search warrant at Wojahn’s residence in College Park where they seized several cell phones, a digital storage device, a tablet, and a computer. Wojahn, who began serving on the College Park City Council in 2007 before being elected mayor in 2015, submitted his resignation to the council the day after the search warrant was served.
Court documents state that Wojahn confirmed to detectives that the Kik account they were investigating for uploading CSAM — “skippy_md” — was operated by him. It also stated he admitted to investigators that he had viewed and possessed files depicting child pornography.
In his resignation letter, Wojahn informed the city council that a warrant had been served on his home as part of an “ongoing police investigation” which did not involve “any official city business of any kind.”
He said his resignation was in the community’s best interest, so he would not be a distraction.
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